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| Lazzarini Catalog Features Conversation with American Master Chuck Close |
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January 30, 2006
The conversation occurred in Chuck Close's studio with (l-r) Close, Lazzarini, and Brad Thomas present.
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The catalogue for this exhibition is $25. To order a copy, contact Brad Thomas, gallery director, at 704-894-2519, or brthomas@davidson.edu.
Art lovers will appreciate a feature in the catalogue of Robert Lazzarini's current exhibition at Davidson College. Curator Brad Thomas, director of the college's VanEvery/Smith Galleries, has included the transcript of a conversation he moderated between Lazzarini and the famous American painter, Chuck Close.
The sixty-six-year-old Close invited forty-year-old Lazzarini to his lower Manhattan studio for a two-and-a-half hour conversation about their formative years, the methods and themes behind their art, and their shared interest in aesthetic exploration.
Over the years, Close has often participated in interviews, and Thomas had read the 1997 book, The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in conversation with 27 of his subjects, by William Bartman. “I had never met Mr. Close, but knew him to be a supporter of younger artists,” said Thomas. “He and Robert Lazzarini had met once before, and Close indicated then that he admired Robert's work.”
Close agreed to a published conversation for the Lazzarini exhibition catalogue, which also includes a foreword by Davidson College art historian Nina Serebrennikov, and an essay by Thomas. Thomas commented, “The conversation adds to the catalogue by allowing a free exchange of ideas, instead of proposing just one interpretation of the work.”
Lazzarini's remarkably skewed and labor intensive sculptural interpretations of everyday objects have been critically acclaimed for about five years, since his series, skulls, appeared in the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition, BitStreams. A year later his distorted payphone appeared in the Whitney Biennial.
But Lazzarini considers himself equally a two- and three-dimensional artist. “They are separate, equal, and distinct endeavors,” he said. “They're two separate investigations, but the philosophy of distortion is the common thread.”
In their conversation, Close expressed admiration for Lazzarini's work, calling him “a painter's sculptor.”
Lazzarini spoke with a class of Davidson students about his work when he was on campus for the opening of his show.
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“He was referring to the fact that Robert's three-dimensional work pursues ideas and aesthetics associated with a two-dimensional investigation,” explained Thomas. “It is important to note that the two-dimensional works are not created as sketches or preparatory studies for his sculptures.”
Untitled- Robert Lazzarini Works on Paper is the first comprehensive exhibition of his drawings and prints. It is on view through February 26, in conjunction with a showing of his sculpture at the Mint Museum in Charlotte scheduled for February 25 through July 16.
The fifty prints and drawings exhibited at Davidson include self-portraits, classical subjects like busts of Hercules and Leonardo da Vinci's Head of the Virgin, and two large works based on Greek marble sculptures of funerary lions from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
Lazzarini has also based a new series of three prints on a work from Davidson College's permanent art collection-a 15th century German manuscript leaf, referred to as A House Beleaguered by Devils, to which he applied compound sine waves. Lazzarini chose that image primarily because it depicts a man cowering in prayer as a pack of devils hack away at his house, which relates to the artist's interest in fear and violence.
Best known for his large-scale, realistic portraits of friends and family members painted in thousands of tiny airbrush bursts, thumbprints, or looping multi-color brushstrokes, Chuck Close has been a leading figure in contemporary art since the early 1970s. He is also a master printmaker, who has, over the course of more than thirty years, pushed the boundaries of traditional printmaking in remarkable ways.
Close's rigorously systematic approach and often visibly gridded formats more nearly approximate those of the minimal and process artists. His paintings are labor intensive and time consuming, and sometimes his prints are more so. A painting can occupy Close for many months, and it is not unusual for one print to take two years to complete. About fifty of his works were exhibited at Davidson in early 2004 in an exhibition entitled Chuck Close: Prints and Process.
Davidson student Ward Long '06 examined Lazzarini's interpretation of the statue of a lion at the Atheneum before it was hung for the show.
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None of Close's images are created digitally or photo-mechanically. He begins with a photograph of his subject, then recreates it entirely by hand. Lazzarini also begins with a photograph of his subject. However, Lazzarini then scans the image into a computer and uses technology to skew the perspective. Once he achieves the desired effect, he copies it by hand onto the
Lazzarini commented in his conversation with Close that the artistic process is “about transformation.”
Close concurred. “The thing that I love about painting is that it transcends its physical reality… To me it's the most magical of mediums because it makes space where there is no space and you can relate to a life experience through some 'colored dirt' smeared on a surface. As opposed to sculpture which occupies real space… your sculpture is just about the only sculpture I can think of that does what paintings do, which is transcend its physical reality in a real sense. It's the thing, but it's the thing that something is happening to, rather than a normal object that we go around and interact with in our normal experiences…That's why you're really a painter's sculptor.”
Close continued to express his appreciation for Lazzarini's work. “It's an amazing thing that you have work that is recognizable as being by a particular person. You can tell it a hundred yards away, going sixty miles an hour in a moving truck. These signifiers, these things that we process, that we know are indicators of who the artist was. I think about that vis-à-vis your work. Because there is a lot of stuff that you've gotten rid of. And I don't think it's just the distortion, I think it's attitudinal and you've really made something which is truly a signature vision. You can really take your hand totally out of there and it's alchemy, you know, it's really alchemy.”
Further transcript of the conversation between the two artists follows:
Lazzarini: I think the process of drawing is inherently less complicated for me, so it is more satisfying in a way.
Close: You should be a painter. Painting is a lot more fun.
Lazzarini: The sculptures are a constant fight. It's like having a relationship with somebody. They come over, you open the front door and as soon as they walk in they take you down to the mat and start wrestling with you. It's exhausting. The pleasure is in the possibility of creating new things.
[ON ARTISTIC MOTIVATION]
Close: That staying hungry, especially when you're making money, is difficult. How do you still care as much as you did at the beginning when you were so hungry for things to happen? I think it's a miracle, if you can do what you want to do every day of your life and make a living doing it.
Lazzarini: It's huge.
Close: In art I chase new experiences, things that don't look like art. Things that seem to be operating outside of what the art world thinks art is. Those are the really great experiences in life… One of things I love about the art world is how elastic the boundary of art is. Something comes along and operates outside of that and it doesn't look like art. And then all of a sudden the art world envelops that thing that was outside. Now the resulting outside shape of the art world has changed because it's digested this thing… experiences which seem to take you some place you haven't been before are few and far between. When I first saw your 'skulls' that happened for me. I thought, “Oh my God, look at this stuff, this is really some place else.”
Lazzarini: That's so nice, thank you.
Close: I like the fact that you're interested in the object status.
Lazzarini: That makes sense because you talk about the face is just a thing to work with. It's just form.
Lazzarini's image inspired by a 15th century German manuscript leaf in the Davidson Permanent Collection entitled "A House Beleaguered by Devils.“
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[ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO OLDER WORK]
Lazzarini: Just recently I've been forced to go back to my earlier drawings… I'm drawing in a different way now than I was before. And there are certain things that I need to get back to. Does that happen to you too sometimes?
Close: I just saw some of my middle-period paintings a while ago. And I was surprised how different what I'm doing now… to me, they were archaic. And my stuff at this particular moment is rococo. I'm looking at it and I said, “You know, there's a kind of crude power that's been lost somehow in the kind of finesse and sophistication.” Even though I like better what I'm doing now in many ways, there has been something lost, and I am going to try to find a way to re-insert some of that.
Lazzarini: So that's something you've been thinking about recently?
Close: Absolutely. I think what you do is periodically insert some new rocks in your shoes. I'm always trying to screw it up in some way… It's very, very hard keeping all the balls in the air decade in and decade out. The art world gravitates in another direction. What the art world wants and what you do may cross paths for a brief moment, and then you're on your own trajectory different than the art world… but you just keep working and if you're lucky your paths will cross again.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its founding by Presbyterians in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine.
Posted By: Bill Giduz
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